Safe

The safety and security you're longing for, and why we still lie awake at night, afraid ...

When my 6-year-old son wakes up in the middle of the night, he goes from sleeping to sprinting in a matter of seconds. Across the house, I hear his pounding footsteps like the four horsemen of the apocalypse, ripping open my fragile dreamlike state.

“I’m scared,” he says. “Can I stay in here all night?”

“A few minutes,” I murmur.

But the bed is sweaty, and we toss and turn, so I take his hand and walk him back across to the bedroom he shares with his older brother.

He collapses into bed.

“Love you,” he calls.

Then, I toss and turn for hours.

***

At 3:38 a.m., awakened and anxious, sometimes I think about Uvalde. Or Sandy Hook. Or Parkland. Or Columbine.

I think of the desperate, contorted faces of the sobbing parents.

My rational brain tries to find escape hatches. These weren’t urban school districts, like my own, right?

But they were public schools.

For a second I wonder: would my kids be safer in a private school we cannot afford?

Could I lock them in a box, a neighborhood, a ZIP code? How could I keep them safe?

***

When people find out I’ve lost a loved one to COVID, I realize they often want to understand what made it happen, and what separated our loss from their life. They want to draw a line, a border fence, to ensure that they will be safe.

We all do. We are all seeking Shangri-La, a mythical place where disaster can’t find us: where the floodwaters won’t stream down our streets, the wildfires won’t suffocate our lungs, the diseases can’t infect us, the shooter’s bullets can’t reach us, the tent encampments will evaporate into the distance.

Unaffected. Safe. Secure.

Isolated.

***

Our human ancestors have always been afraid. Once, of animal predators like wooly mammoths and wolves and bears. Soon, of one another: of people who looked different and spoke differently and worshipped different gods.

I find, though, that those who live behind the tallest fences, the deepest moats, the most advanced security systems and gated communities: the most isolated and wealthy of us all, remain the most afraid. Their search for safety and security leads them into increasing and terrifying isolation, a deadly separation from the world around them and the people in it, who become scary and threatening.

They fly alone in private jets, skipping airport security. They walk behind velvet ropes and stay in exclusive lodges apart from the world, where they see the same people over and over again in Aspen and Beverly Hills and Gstaad and Brentwood, Tenn., and the Upper East Side. They talk about how afraid they are, of the teeming earth and her people.

When COVID first came to the West, public health experts advised lockdowns and isolation, to keep the most vulnerable among us safe while we learned about the virus. But lockdowns and isolation were never meant to be a permanent solution to the safety and security the world requires. They were a temporary measure, a precursor to cooperative measures like masking, distancing, vaccines, and therapeutics. We could not retreat forever into oblivion. We needed one another’s help. Too often, we didn’t see this, and we only made decisions based on ourselves and our personal needs.

***

Last year, mired in grief and burnt out from preaching hope in a world bent toward cynicism and nihilism and conspiracy, I traveled to northern Minnesota to spend two nights in a hermitage. It was a cabin in the woods with no running water or indoor plumbing, though I had 5G Internet access, and healthy meals delivered to me in an insulated cooler at my doorstep.

For two days, I didn’t speak to anyone. I walked through the woods in my blaze orange vest because it was deer hunting season, and I heard gunshots in the distance. Once, I heard the pattering of cloven hooves, running for their lives next to me, and I decided my walk was over.

The hermitage was good for me. I wrote and wrote and wrote some more, and I was quiet, and I prayed, and in the morning I emptied the bucket. A bit of isolation was OK. But I was not safe, nor secure, in this utter isolation.

***

I believe our greatest safety and security comes not from isolation, distance, walls, or borders - but instead it comes from something free and costly and priceless. Love.

Love.

When I met my now-husband, Ben, I was 19 years old. I admired his basketball skills, the fact that he could dunk, and also that he was a math whiz in his engineering courses. I liked his kindness and his consideration of the world around him, in quiet and unobtrusive ways.

But mostly, I loved that he made me feel safe and secure. He was steady, stable, like an immovable rock, and I have clung to him ever since. Together we have triumphed and suffered and struggled and laughed and cried, but at the innermost core of our relationship, there is an acknowledgement of trust and security and safety. It came only because we decided to be totally vulnerable to one another, and when we knew how deeply we could hurt one another, and chose instead to love, we felt safe.

***

Political polling in recent years tends to show that many Americans are afraid, concerned, alternatively, about “public safety” “violent crime” or “safety and security.” Often, those who rank this issue of highest importance are people living in so-called “red states,” or those who identify as Republicans, and a high percentage of white Evangelical or politically conservative Christians.

These voters make up many of my friends, family, and likely those of you reading this newsletter may also identify with this group, and count them among your friends, family, and community as well. These voters are also disproportionately concerned about “illegal immigration” and “secure borders,” though non-white Americans living close to the U.S./Mexico border also often rank these equally high.

Photo Credit: Ray Ewing, Vineyard Gazette

When I read last week about groups of Venezuelan migrants, in Texas legally after applying for asylum due to political unrest and violence/economic devastation and lack of access to food and shelter and opportunity in their home country, being flown/bused to Martha’s Vineyard, Washington, D.C., and California, on false promises of jobs and homes, as part of a political stunt meant to embarrass Democrats, I thought about how desperately people want to be safe, and how we think we’ll be safe when we isolate ourselves from the world.

I thought about active shooter drills, and handgun training courses for women and Black people, and Ring doorbells, and NextDoor neighborhood gossip sites.

I thought about the saying that “good fences make good neighbors,” and the St. Louis couple who stood outside their home pointing guns at racial justice protesters in the summer of 2020.

I think they are the most afraid of all. A world without love is a scary place to be.

***

In 2018, while traveling the country doing research for my book, Red State Christians, I spent a few days in El Paso, and an afternoon in Juarez, Mexico, to talk to Christian leaders and people of faith about border issues and immigration and politics.

I remember the local Southern Baptist pastor, a graduate of Liberty University and a second-generation Mexican immigrant, telling me about the military veterans and Border Patrol members and DACA recipients in his congregation, and how sometimes they didn’t know who each other were, and they didn’t see the faces and hearts and empty bellies behind the screaming headlines and talk radio hosts and belligerent, bellicose politicians.

“I think the most important thing to remember is that they’re people. The asylum seekers coming across are people. It’s easy to call names or put people in categories, but they’re people first, and we do need to have compassion. We have Dreamers in our church in leadership positions. I see people write on social media and I think, ‘If you knew that [Joe] was here illegally, would you still think that way?’ People need to have a name and face. I think you should know who they are before you talk about them. As Christians, we don’t have the right to dehumanize people. We don’t have a right to write people off. As Americans, you can do whatever you want. But as Christians, we have to show the compassion of Christ,” said Pastor Ariel Martinez.

***

Maybe, today, you are in a place where you need a break from the world. You need silence and rest and restoration. Take that time as you need it.

But if you are longing for lasting safety and security, you will not find it in a lonely fortress. I have felt it pulling on me, lately, this desire to reengage in the world, to find security and safety by entering into peoples’ lives first with love.

I know again and again that shared safety and security will be shattered by violence and hatred. Still, the shattering never lasts. The safety comes again, only when we connect to one another in forgiveness and love.

When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.

- Leviticus 19:33-34

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